I was supposed to drive down to LA this evening . . . I had been planning it I guess for several weeks. Matt was going to fly into LAX from Chicago and I would pick him up there in his own car and then we’d find a diner and sit down and figure out where to sleep that night, probably in the trunk and back seat of his car. It is true that I have slept in the trunk of Matt’s car several times in Los Angeles, and mostly it has been OK. But I didn’t have it in me this weekend because I seem to be bleeding internally. Maybe I have some sort of ulcer or something.
At any rate I’m a bloody mess on the inside. I discovered this when I went to this smog check place near my house that does DMV shit. I was standing there at the counter talking to this guy, and midway through our conversation I started to feel real bad . . . like I was gonna to faint even. He said something about the astronomical taxes I have to pay to transfer the title of my Datsun over to me, and I said hell man ain’t that just the way of the world huh, and right about there I nearly threw up on the counter and collapsed. But somehow I did not lay down and die. I don’t know where the strength to go on came from, but I found a little bit of it and remained on two feet. I was badly faded at any rate, and this guy was saying he couldn’t fit both of my middle names on the form, and I told him to axe them altogether so I could escape. I mean, hell, my grandmother never had a middle name, and she got by just fine for 91 years without one. So he omitted them and printed out some shit and handed me that shit and I got the hell out of there and went home. It was there I discovered that my dark suspicion was correct: something inside was torn up bad. For everyone’s sake I won’t say anymore than that.
Yes, and I did end up collapsing in the center of my bed with my feet hanging over the side. I may have slept for two hours, I don’t know. I dreamed of blood, I really did. All I saw inside those dark dreams was blood. I woke up feeling practically anemic and so I went out to the kitchen and ate a bunch of spinach. Laura was watching BLADE RUNNER 2049 and Dante was asleep on the couch next to her. I told her, I said: “I’m not going to LA.” And so I didn’t go.
I was supposed to see some people down there, but what the hell, what good would it have done me or any of them, really? I feel like hell and I’ve been in this godawful mood all day. Probably all of that would have been present in me in LA, and I would have had to suppress it to be worth being around. And even then, who knows how good I would have been at hiding the fact that my insides are twisted and hollowed out and bleeding. I can feel it, man. How long do I wait before to drive myself to the ER? I wonder. If there is blood all over my bed when I wake up tomorrow afternoon I will get in my newly-registered car and see what can be done about my ailing body. But then again Laura did point out that a woman on her period loses much more blood than I have. So probably I’m just being a big baby about the whole thing. The hazy slushed sleepiness I experienced is probably a placebo effect. I had convinced myself I was losing all my blood and so I believed it when I felt the slightest trace of death. Well, whatever . . . there are worse things to convince yourself of I reckon.
I say this a lot, but I really am losing it. Last month around this time I had a sort of psychic break that was invisible to me until yesterday. I knew then that I had been living in a sort of manic dream. I finally woke up for reasons I won’t get into right now, or probably ever. I had seen something, and it made me feel a certain way to see that thing. It had been a long time since I had last seen it. But of course none of it was real, or at the very least it was temporary and shallow. I didn’t want anything new—just that old feeling. What had happened to the feeling? That is probably the last time it will ever come my way. But that’s just par for the course, baby. I know I’m delusional. I just really want to believe those delusions sometimes. It only ever works out for a few weeks though, and then I revert back to my less interesting and way lonelier delusions. Hmm!!
And now it is 5 a.m. and I am alone in Oakland instead of sleeping in a car with Matt in Los Angeles. I’m looking at a calendar and yes I think I can try again in two weeks assuming I haven’t bled out by then. I will go to that place because I don’t know what else to do, and I’ll probably sit alone at House of Pies or whatever the hell that place is, and wonder where my friends are.
Here is a melodramatic picture of me in my bedroom that I took just now. Dante is asleep on my lap. My gastrointestinal tract is slicked with blood. I can feel it looping its way down my body like it thinks it’s at a god damn waterpark. I aways figured whatever killed me would start from the inside. For now this is what I look like. I am leaving it here for posterity. Sometimes people ask me what color my eyes are, and despite the fact that they are looking directly into them as they ask me, they always make a face and tell me I’m wrong when I say they are green, which I think is really bizarre. I don’t know what to do with a person like that. Maybe this photo is proof of the greenness of my eyes. For whatever it’s worth, there it is. Yeah.
